Everybody hates telemarketers, but the classic stranger on the line phone call has an important limiting factor: humans. Somebody has to get paid to make those calls, so there are big financial reasons for the spammers to knock it off.

Robocalls, on the other hand, require much less manpower so the bad actors have incentives to make a lot of them—even when rarely successful. With that in mind, Google, Samsung, Apple, and several other major tech corporations are getting together to try to protect consumers from predatory robocalls.

This project was started at the request of the FCC, whose director Tom Wheeler says robocalls are the agency's top source of citizen complaints. The so-called "Robocall Strike Force" is being led by AT&T's CEO, Randall Stephenson. The other companies involved make for a rather star-studded list:

AT&T

Apple

ATIS

Bandwidth

Blackberry

British Telecom

CenturyLink

Charter

Cincinnati Bell

Comcast

Consumers Union

Cox

Ericsson

FairPoint

Frontier

Google

Inteliquent

Level 3

LG

Microsoft

Nokia

Qualcomm

Samsung

Silver Star

Sirius XM

Sprint

Syniverse

T-Mobile

U.S. Cellular

Verizon

West

Windstream

X5 Solutions

What's important here is that solutions that are implemented on a phone by phone or carrier by carrier basis are less likely to provide lasting fixes than ones that are cooperative and universal. For instance, Google's recent update to the dialer app that warns about potential spam calls and allows easy reporting would work better if it could draw from a collective database for warnings and contribute to the same collective database when reports are made. The strike force has all major American carriers, the makers of the top 3 mobile operating systems, and several other key players involved in this initiative.

In the near term, focus will be on VOIP calling. AT&T says the group will rapidly conform to caller ID verification standards once the standards are completed, saying a major vector for fraud currently is ID spoofing. They are looking into whether a "do not originate" list can be created, blocking the source of the call irrespective of how it may be routed to appear to be from a more legitimate source.

The group acknowledges that the aforementioned are fairly short-term solutions and even then, more information is needed to know how to implement them.

Dealing with the broad category of "unwanted calls" is difficult. First, any solution has to have a near-zero false positive rate. Just a single instance of perfectly legitimate callers being blocked from reaching one another presents a big headache, especially when the proposed designs keep the consumer from being aware that a call was attempted.

The second challenge is that there are two types of unwanted calls. There are those that are legal but potentially unwanted, like general solicitations, opinion polls, and the like. Philosophical and legal issues have to be sorted out when it comes to sweeping filters on those kinds of calls.

Beyond those, you have the patently illegal calls that are ignoring "Do Not Call" registries, lying about their origin, and similar issues. You want to block all of those, but it is less than clear just how you differentiate these two types of calls at the phone, carrier, and network levels—not to mention ensuring that they aren't wanted callers.

The group will be presenting more detailed plans and goals, which will include longer-term ideas for blocking at the network level, to the FCC on October 19th.

They do that to lure you into proving that you're a "live" number to sell to other telemarketers. It does just the opposite of "taking you off" the list - it increases the value of your phone number to sell to even more telemarketers.

Randroid

I had one call me almost every day for 2 weeks until I finally listened long enough to hear the "press 2" part. Once I did, the calls finally stopped.

if the number is blocked I use google voice to route it straight to a special voicemail that says "you're calling from a private number and I don't accept private calls, please unblock your number and dial me again"

They're spam 99% of the time and I haven't missed a single worthwhile call

Railwayman

Excellent solution. I will configure that myself since I usually block private numbers.

If I don't have the # in my contacts anymore I just stopped answering- especially if it's an area code outside of my state.

If it's an in-state area code and I'm awaiting a call for something then I might answer if I suspect that it has a purpose, but usually if it's important people will leave a voicemail I can screen once google voice transcribes it.

n_a_v

If this happens, what are Josh from Customer Service and Rachel from Cardholder Services going to do for work?

TechGuy22

most annoying thing ever invented

JLV90

you're being audited by the IRS too?

NavyVeteran

I am.. I got one Friday.. Didn't know the IRS used folks from India to call me about my taxation matters. lol

Jesus, I get calls from an Indian accented person saying the IRS is after me. LOL I get auto glass calls, insurance calls.. I am tired of the spoof numbers as well.

Swami

Accent Neutralization programs are picking up here (India) in the past couple of years.. Gear up for accent-less IRS calls in the future.. :P

NavyVeteran

Great thanx Swami.. I have no problem with accents, just spam calls. :P

Tyler

I have a very hard time understanding Indian accents, so I actually look forward to that (not the spam calls though - but legit call centers based in India)

Swami

"Indian" accent is kind of incorrect.. We have multitude languages here & when we speak English, it'll have the influence of one of those languages.. I, from Southern India, have very hard time understanding people from East/North India.. So yeah, I understand your pain!!

blindexecutioner

This is great news. The IRS is suing me as we speak. I am supposed to give them a call back to discuss it or something.

Well, you probably already know this, but its a scam. Something that needs to be reported to not only the FCC, but the IRS as well. IRS does not actually call people, only mail. However, no one stops from wasting the scammers time though, that's.. fun.

Defenestratus

At first I thought this was about bloatware apps and services being preinstalled.. then I saw "Apple" and "carriers" in the participating parties and a little piece of me died inside instead.

AdamH

That's real thing in the US? Wow, finally something EU did right.

Captain_Invisible

Yeah, that sounds completely crazy. I've never ever had an unwanted call like that, that wasn't from a newspaper company or some legit company wanting me to answer a few questions.

Unfortunately it is. Matter of fact, I just got a call yesterday (from my city's area code, and I typically answer those because I have someone I know that does contact me without a stable phone number -_-) about some stupid cruise. Personally I'm getting sick of them because that same robocall keeps calling from different phone numbers.

Mix

How else will I hear about all those travel dollars my lucky ass keeps winning!?

Yup, on project Fi and have the new Dialer and no go. I think it's more to do with it not being able to tell between spoofed and real numbers.

C64

Would you work for shit?

SyCoREAPER

Depends if the shit is valuable, like guano. It's valuable if I recall, which to me is totally batshit.

C64

Think you should stop smoking that shit 🤔

SyCoREAPER

I wouldn't do that, that's shitty and bad for my health. Let others smoke a turd.

Tyler

Until number spoofing goes away, they'll never do well. Anytime they use a flagged number, all they have to do is change to a different one, and presto - not flagged anymore.

SIGTRAP

But then I wouldn't get to learn how to make $10,000 a week!

C64

Samsung & Apple fighting on the same side. Now i finally believe in world peace

wuafri

I route most of my robot calls to the jolly rancher robot ;)

Jon

I've enjoyed the Truecaller app on my N5, it does a pretty decent job. Better than the one "SPAM" contact I had setup to go straight to VM and just kept adding numbers to it lol. But even if each carrier did it, it should be pretty easy to see a group of numbers robocalling all your customers and just block that number (send to VM). That's all I want, don't have to block completely just send to VM in case you're wrong and I wanted that call. Also, an option to send any # not in my contacts to VM. It's like 1% of the time that I actually want to answer a call from a number I don't have in my contacts.